


And Fifteen Nights

by strippedhalo



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-03
Updated: 2011-04-03
Packaged: 2017-10-17 13:07:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/177153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strippedhalo/pseuds/strippedhalo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hermione thinks she can be sure of Ron. And then she is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Fifteen Nights

Harry got a bed to himself because he still had terrible nightmares, and tended to thrash about when they came. Lupin got a bed to himself because no matter how mild mannered and kind he was, everyone was still a bit nervous about sharing sleeping space with a werewolf. Snape got a bed to himself because, well, because he was Snape. Everyone else had to double up, though, and since there were an odd number of girls, and everyone expected them to get married in a few years anyway, Hermione ended up sharing her bed with Ron.

The first three nights, she lay awake for hours, waiting for Ron to try something. A hand slipped under the t-shirt – his – that she was using as a nightshirt, maybe. Or perhaps a leg insinuated between hers, fingers curved over her breast in the guise of sleep. She was sure he would make a move – he was, after all, a boy. A boy she had kissed, and several times, at that.

He kicked her once, the second night, in the middle of rolling over too fast. He yanked his foot away immediately, and mumbled a sleepy apology, and that was about as fresh as Ron got under the covers.

It was a relief and a disappointment at the same time.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hiding out in a series of caves along the Irish coast was not as exciting as Hermione might have imagined it to be, before it had actually happened to her. They ate the same thing – bland grey stew, rationed – at every meal, they couldn’t go outside, and everything felt ever so slightly damp all of the time. The only reading materials they had were the five books she and Lupin had had between them at the time of escape, plus a rather unsavory Muggle magazine that Seamus apparently carried in a pocket of his robes everywhere he went. Snape and Lupin did take turns drilling everyone in Defense in one of the larger caves, but there were only so many times you could Stun someone before all the thrill went out of it.

Still, Hermione found herself hard pressed to bite her tongue when she noticed how frequently Ron seemed to be sleeping in the middle of the day.

On the seventh day, when she caught him sleeping through lunch _again_ , she huffed and would have woken him, but Harry stopped her, saying, “Let him be. It isn’t like he’s got anything better to do right now.”

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On the eleventh night, Hermione awoke to a horrible keening emanating from the next bed – Harry’s bed. She was on her feet and at Harry’s side before she noticed that Ron wasn’t beside her. In fact, Ron was nowhere to be seen. There was no time to worry about his absence, though, as Harry had started to thrash, violent convulsions that jerked his head back and forth on the pillow.

“Harry. Harry!” Hermione grabbed his shoulder and shook him, hoping to wake him. When that didn’t work, she steeled herself and slapped him hard across the face.

Harry sat up with a jolt, but before he’d come fully awake, he hit out wildly at Hermione, hissing with a terrified fury that was like nothing she’d ever heard. She leapt backwards, knocking over a stool that was pulled close to Harry’s bedside. The clatter of the wood hitting the stone floor of the cave seemed to bring Harry back to himself, and he stared at her for a long moment, blinking slowly.

“Sorry,” he said, finally. “Where’s Ron?”

Ron was still nowhere in sight, and since everyone else had been woken up by Harry’s nightmare, they organized a search of the caves, but to no avail. Ron was nowhere to be found.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the days that followed, Hermione divided her time between reassuring Harry that Ron would be fine, that there was a perfectly good explanation for why he had suddenly disappeared in the middle of the night with no word of warning, in the middle of a war in which his best friend was the prime target, and letting Harry reassure her of the same. Harry woke the entire cave up every night with his nightmares, and Hermione learned that the reason Ron had been napping every day was that he was up most of every night trying to keep Harry’s nightmares from getting out of hand.

It was, in a word, awful.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hermione woke on the fifteenth night, not from the sounds of another nightmare, but rather from the lack of them. The extended quiet was strange, now that she knew to expect it to be broken, and the strangeness drew her out of sleep. What she saw when she glanced over to Harry’s bed made her sit straight up and rub her eyes to make sure she wasn’t imagining things.

 _Ron._

He was sitting on the stool by Harry’s bed, holding Harry’s hand and whispering things Hermione couldn’t hear from her bed. As she watched, the lines of tension eased from Harry’s sleeping face and were replaced with a look of relaxed calm. Ron had managed to avert the nightmare in its early stages, then, rather than simply soothing Harry through the aftermath when it was already too late.

Without consciously deciding to move, Hermione found herself standing next to Ron, reaching out to touch his shoulder to prove to herself that he was really there. He really was.

“Brought you a present,” Ron said, whispering so as not to wake anyone else up. He held out his rucksack.

Hermione accepted it with one hand, and dropped it with a loud thud immediately, not expecting it to be so heavy. After a quick look around to make sure she hadn’t woken anyone with the noise, she bent to open it and gasped in amazement.

The bag was filled with books, hundreds of them, shrunk to fit. She scanned them quickly, seeing many familiar titles, and some she’d never heard of. She tapped one with her wand, restoring it to its actual size, and flipping the cover open to see the stamp: _Property of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry_.

She leapt up and threw herself at Ron in one exuberant motion. Ron rocked dangerously far back on his stool before he recovered enough to right himself and return Hermione’s fierce embrace.

“You beautiful, perfect boy,” she finally said, punctuating each word with a kiss planted soundly on his lips. “However did you get them?”

Ron took a deep breath. “I went back to Hogwarts, and took them from the library. I tried to get ones that looked helpful, but I couldn’t really tell which one would be best. I took a lot, though, so some should be useful.”

“But how did you get in without getting caught?”

“That part was dead easy, actually,” he admitted with a grin. “There are detection spells and security charms all over the place, but they’re all keyed to let any pureblood wizard who’s got a Death Eater’s mask through.”

“Where did you get a Death Eater’s mask?” _And have you lost your mind entirely, walking right into enemy territory like a child playing dress-up?_ , she thought.

“From. Uh. Well, from Professor Snape. It was his idea, really.” Ron looked quite uncomfortable.

Hermione, on the other hand, was furious. “I knew it. I _knew_ he had something to do with it! He said he didn’t know where you’d gone, that lying, greasy, horrible-“

“Shhh!” Ron covered Hermione’s mouth with his hand. “You’ll wake everyone up.”

Still angry, Hermione glared at him, but nodded her head.

“That’s better.” Ron took his hand back. “Anyway, he couldn’t tell you what I was doing, because you and Harry would have insisted on coming after me.”

“You’re bloody right we would!”

“But you couldn’t have gotten into the castle,” he reminded her. “Only pureblood wizards with Death Eater’s masks, remember? You’d both have been caught, and most likely killed. So he couldn’t tell you, you see?”

There was an undeniable truth to that, but Hermione still felt cheated, somehow. And the thought of what could have happened to Ron, out there alone, was chilling. Still, he was back safely, and that was a very warm thought.

“I brought clothes, too.” Ron opened another, smaller bag which had been concealed beneath his cloak. “No one’s been able to work out the password for Gryffindor Tower, and the Fat Lady won’t let anyone in without it, so nothing’s been touched in there.” A small bit of tension in Hermione’s chest eased at that bit of news. One thing, then, was safe and unchanged, at least for now.

“I got me and Harry’s things out of our room, but the stairs still won’t let me into the girl’s dormitory, so I Accioed everything of yours that I could remember.” He thrust a small bundle of clothes into her arms – familiar sweaters and jeans and even an old set of robes. There was also a particularly flowery nightgown that she had always hated, and, much to her embarrassment, a lacey pink bra and panty set that was the only bit of lingerie she owned (and that Ron shouldn’t even have known existed).

She looked up at him, mouth open to demand an explanation, but the look of utter mortification on his face stopped her. It was, after all, quite thoughtful of him to have remembered underthings at all, and she was glad to have something clean to wear.

She settled for leaning up to kiss his cheek. “Thank you,” she said. “You are amazing, Ron Weasley.” She was rewarded with a slow smile and a renewed reddening of Ron’s cheeks as she turned and walked back to their shared bed.

Ron sat by Harry’s bed for a while longer, making sure the nightmare had truly passed. Hermione lay awake, quiet and still on her side of the bed, thinking. When Ron finally slipped beneath the covers beside her, Hermione waited until he had settled before taking a deep breath and rolling toward his warmth. She felt him tense when she situated her head on his shoulder, and felt, rather than heard, the deep breath that he took before he shifted enough to wrap one arm around her.

She gave herself up to sleep completely, never safer, never more contented.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for tarie in 2004, and originally posted [here](http://community.livejournal.com/ot_fic_exchange/6560.html).


End file.
